MARCELA SANCHEZ
Los Republicanos

July 22, 2007

Last month during the contentious immigration debate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney held a closed-door meeting with his Hispanic steering committee to navigate the immigration battle and build an outreach program for like-minded Hispanic voters. Even as his campaign was on the verge of collapse, Sen. John McCain was searching far and wide for a top-notch Hispanic finance chairman to build upon President Bush's gains among Hispanic donors in the 2000 and 2004 election cycles. Non-candidate Fred Thompson received a boost for his campaign when Hispanic Republicans started Latinos 4 Thompson.

At least some of the Republican candidates for president are taking the Hispanic vote seriously for 2008, and it is little wonder. We made up just 8.5 percent of the electorate in 2004, but we are the fastest-growing and one of the most independent-minded voting blocs today. We are also concentrated in states critical to the presidential process – California, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado – and we will play a major role in determining the outcome of future elections.

Despite our Democratic tendencies, Republicans have another reason to appeal to Hispanics. We also comprise one of America's largest business-minded and culturally conservative groups. As our numbers continue to grow and we break every economic and social stereotype about us, it's only a matter of time before we break the political one as well -- that we are and will always be a Democratic constituency.

THE REPUBLICANS' CHOICE

After a disastrous 2006 election cycle in which they lost ground with almost every demographic and economic group, Republicans are faced with a choice. Will they reach out to the nation's fastest-growing and (at roughly 43 million) largest ethnic minority, or will they simply write off the Latino vote as intractably Democratic and unwinnable?

The latter would be foolish because it is based on a false assumption. To be sure, Democrats have won the Hispanic vote in recent elections, but by wildly inconsistent margins. Between 1996 and 2004, the Democratic share of the Hispanic vote had been in free fall, descending from 72 percent for Bill Clinton's second term to 53 percent for John Kerry.

While working for the Republican National Committee under Jim Nicholson in 1999, I was closely involved in the party's effort to woo Hispanics that would ultimately help Bush win 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000. When we began, we formed voter models that showed Republicans winning varied levels of the Hispanic vote: if Republicans could not consistently do better than 25 percent among Hispanics, they would likely never win another presidential election after 2008. We conducted surveys, bought television, radio and newspaper ads, sent out dozens of Hispanic proxy speakers for Bush and crafted a message designed to appeal to Hispanic Americans.

The results of Republican hard work spoke for themselves in both 2000 and 2004. In 1996, Hispanic voters had given a pathetic 21 percent of their support to Senator Bob Dole, R-Kan., in a three-way election that was not very close. Eight years later, they shattered the paradigm of the “Emerging Democratic Majority” by giving 44 percent to George W. Bush in a tight presidential contest. We were helped by the fact that Bush – then wildly popular with Hispanics – was the Republican candidate. With so few Hispanics calling themselves Republicans, it is not the party label that will gain their support but the candidates themselves. In fact, since the 1970s many strong Republican candidates have fared well with Hispanic voters.

The assumption in 1999 – I believe proven true – was that Latinos are best described as a swing vote with a center of gravity in the low-to-mid 30s in terms of GOP support. Republicans will not likely win huge national majorities of the Hispanic vote in the next two decades – to say otherwise is unrealistic. But this is not necessary for the GOP to return to power or even attain dominance in American politics. If they compete seriously for Latino votes, Republicans can in the short run move the Hispanic GOP center of gravity into the low 40s. If that continues to happen, Democrats would be hard pressed to win future presidential elections.

UNRESOLVED TENSIONS

Why are Hispanics so volatile within the electorate? The short answer is that we are still looking for our place in it. We are not necessarily stuck on one party, even if we do lean in one direction. Taken as a whole, Latinos vote Democratic like our parents before us, in many cases never questioning why. And yet there is an unmistakable tension between the cultural values we express consistently in surveys and the platform of the Democratic Party.

The Latino Coalition survey of Hispanic voters in October 2006 came at the worst time politically for Republicans in at least eight years, yet it found in Latinos a deep conservatism that extends both to fiscal and social issues. Thirty-four percent of Latinos self-identify as “conservative,” a number comparable to the population at large (32 percent in one recent survey). The same survey finds, unsurprisingly, that Latinos in America are more pro-life on abortion (54 percent), and more weary of candidates that support same-sex marriage (59 percent) than their fellow citizens.

Other demographic characteristics give us traits similar to those of Republican voters. We marry (and intermarry) more, and divorce less than the general population; we attend church more frequently and identify ourselves as Christians at higher rates than non-Hispanic whites.

Looking at the 19 percent drop Democrats suffered with Latinos from Clinton to Kerry, one might even be tempted to ask how long Democrats can hold on to the Hispanic vote as their politicians and strategists denounce our beliefs – deriding, for example, our traditional understanding of marriage as “bigoted.” As Spanish-language Christian radio stations were springing up in major cities due to popular demand, a sitting Democratic senator from Iowa was calling Christian broadcasters “our own homegrown Taliban.” Somewhere, something has to give.

Meanwhile, Hispanic economic power has gathered such steam in recent years as to propel millions of us into the traditionally Republican ranks of home and business owners. This is already affecting our economic views. In the survey referenced above, a surprising 56 percent of Hispanics said that to “lower taxes on families and businesses” is “the best strategy to begin growing the economy again.”

That may seem counterintuitive, but so is today's Hispanic economic reality. Many Americans grew up with the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, but how many lazy Mexicans can you say you've actually seen in the last week? Not only do Hispanics participate in the labor market at astonishingly high rates and enjoy a historically low 5.7 percent unemployment rate, we have also been starting three times as many small businesses per person as the general population since 1998. Today, an estimated 2 million Hispanic-owned businesses are creating new wealth and employing millions of Americans.

According to the Hispanic Business Research Group, U.S. Latinos now have over $760 billion in purchasing power, and the business of advertising to Hispanic consumers in the United States is valued at $5 billion per year. (The biggest advertiser? Ingles sin Barreras, a set of English-language-learning tapes. This is itself significant.)

Within a decade, as we continue to build wealth in our millions of businesses, Hispanics will be disproportionately affected by high marginal tax rates and even the death tax – great problems to have when you're coming from so little. Also, because so many of us work, we will suffer disproportionately from a Social Security system that is mandatory for all workers but offers an anemic rate of return. All of these are bread-and-butter economic issues for Republicans that will someday resonate with Hispanics.

Latino upward mobility explains in part why, even as we remain at the bottom of the income pool (and the numbers are dragged down by new arrivals and illegal workers), we are the nation's most optimistic ethnic voting bloc. A post-election Wall Street Journal poll last year showed Hispanic voters 10 points less likely than the general population to say that we “believe life will be worse for the next generation.”

Far more surprising – and again, counterintuitive – is the degree to which Latinos reject the class-warfare paradigm on which the left thrives, of an America consisting of “haves” and “have-nots.” One may not be surprised to find that 57 percent of whites rejected this idea in a July 2006 Gallup survey, compared to just 31 percent of African-Americans. But 64 percent of Hispanics in that survey disagreed with this idea of class struggle in America. This should cast serious doubt on the wisdom of John Edwards's economic populism.

Can Republicans win Hispanic hearts with appeals to this optimism and this fiscal and social conservatism? Ronald Reagan certainly did. His re-election campaign of 1984 drew 37 percent of Hispanic voters. Even though he was certain to clobber Walter Mondale in his home state of California, he set up a Latino outreach operation there because he was thinking of the future for the state's Republicans. In fact, in various states and by varied methods, forward-looking Republican politicians going all the way back to Richard Nixon have studied and courted Latino voters, even back when we represented a much smaller portion of the electorate.

The potential is enormous for Republicans to seek and receive more Hispanic votes, provided that the party will welcome them into the political process. This is just one more reason why a gradual Hispanic realignment can take shape – a strong current beneath the waves on the surface of America's political ocean.

BEYOND IMMIGRATION

Believe it or not, today's Republican dilemma over Latinos does not revolve around the contentious immigration issue – except, perhaps, to the extent that it can breed ugly racial rhetoric, offensive to immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Election 2006 was a major setback. A memo from a major Hispanic group expresses fear that “in spite of Hispanic voter recruitment gains for conservatives, recent anti-immigration activities have isolated the Latino community again.”

Yet at the same time, the assumption that a so-called “amnesty” or loosening of immigration laws will win the undying loyalty of Latino voters to the GOP has always been an incorrect stereotype that should be set aside for good. Latinos legally eligible to vote – many of them non-immigrants, and all of them U.S. citizens – rank immigration relatively low in the hierarchy of issues they care about most.

The real question is whether conservatives can accept and welcome the cultural differences of a potential political ally. It sounds easy enough, but there are a few very vocal conservative politicians and commentators who would rather cede the Hispanic vote to the left than exert the effort required to cultivate it. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., best known for his anti-immigration position (he even asserted in a recent presidential debate that there was too much legal immigration), famously denounced Miami as a “third world city” last year. To go by his own explanation, it is simply because there are too many people there who speak Spanish. Never mind that a very large number of them are American citizens or legal immigrants who fled from communism.

Some writers, coming from this ideological tradition, carry on as if the worst thing that could possibly happen to America is that it should become more Hispanic. Heather MacDonald of City Journal has written frequently, usually based on anecdotal evidence, that Hispanics in America are so badly steeped in illegitimacy and their families so unstable that their presence threatens to bring about social collapse. On the other hand, the United States Census finds that 65 percent of Hispanic children under 18 live with two married parents, compared to 67 percent among the general population. You can decide for yourself which one is a better source.

These voices are loud, but Republicans don't have to let them dominate. Despite the damage of 2006, nothing is impossible for the GOP when it comes to the Hispanic vote. As long as the party reaches out with a welcoming and optimistic conservative message, Hispanic voters have shown we are ready to listen.

Sanchez, former director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001-2003, is owner of the Hispanic communications research firm Impacto Group. She is also author of the forthcoming book “Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other.” Sanchez can be reached via e-mail at leslie@impactogroup.com.